Criollos, Caudillos, and the Violent State

Abstract

Argentina’s intense political struggles of the turn of the century have often been framed as a local versus foreign conflict. This chapter argues that Eduardo Gutiérrez’s and José J. Podestá’s Juan Moreira, Ezequiel Soria’s Justicia criolla, and Nemesio Trejo’s Libertad de sufragio and Los políticos frame politics differently, suggesting instead that modernity’s substitution of criollo values with market values opens a space for abusive politicians to rule. Through a diverse repertoire of performative tactics they frame the political and justice systems as lucrative, violent systems dominated by opportunists, illustrating the need to turn to political alternatives taken from popular criollismo, such as justicia criolla. Thus, they realign resistance with the local popular culture and, paradoxically, open a space for cross-cultural alliances against the oligarchy grounded in the precarity of the popular sectors.

Chamosa, Oscar. 2010. Criollo and Peronist: The Argentine Folklore Movement During the First Peronism, 1943/1955. In The New Cultural History of Peronism: Power and Identity in Mid-Twentieth-Century Argentina, ed. Matthew B. Karush and Oscar Chamosa. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar